Nohah Forde is a doctoral researcher at the University of Canterbury, Ōtautahi/Christchurch, working across the Media and Communication and Civil Systems Engineering departments. Her PhD examines inter-professional communication in climate adaptation governance in Aotearoa New Zealand, arguing that communication is constitutive of risk governance capacity, not simply a tool for delivering it.

Her research integrates risk governance frameworks with organisational communication theory to examine how professionals coordinate across disciplinary and institutional boundaries in a governance domain characterised by deep uncertainty, fragmented authority, and contested expertise. Drawing on 15 semi-structured interviews with adaptation professionals across public and private sector, the work reveals how disciplinary identities, epistemic boundary work, and institutional fragmentation sustain a mismatch between the integrative demands of climate adaptation and the predominantly multidisciplinary modes of collaboration professionals bring to it. Situating this finding within risk governance literature, the research identifies a significant theoretical gap and proposes a reframing with implications for how governance capacity is understood and developed in complex policy domains.

Before (re)entering academia for her PhD, Nohah spent six years as a communication practitioner working in insurance and local government. She holds a UC Te Aho Hinatore Accelerator PhD Scholarship and expects to submit her thesis in the middle of 2026.